When the murderous school caretaker Ian Huntley lured pupils Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman into his house in Soham in 2002, it was to start a far reaching chain of events.
Just as Shipman led to revalidation, Huntley has generated a new layer of regulation for anyone working with children and vulnerable adults. The ensuing Bichard Inquiry heavily criticised the police for failing to check Huntley’s chequered past enabling him to get a job in a school.
This year the government set up the Vetting and Barring Scheme in response. Its aims are honourable. As the name suggests, the scheme will attempt to bar unsuitable people from working with children or vulnerable adults, by making it a criminal offence for them to do so, and it will vet those that apply.
The scheme is run by the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) which has significant - and seemingly unaccountable - powers. The growing hysteria surrounding high profile child abuse cases has helped drive these developments.
It currently regards all patients as vulnerable and is urging employers to report any professional whose actions raise concern. This could include doctors innocently involved in medical error cases. Employers face a £5,000 fine for failing to notify ISA of any concerns with staff.
ISA will be able to automatically bar doctors accused of the most serious offences without any right of appeal. Doctors are going to have to register with VBS from July next year and pay for the privilege.
So, while we’re still digesting revalidation - questioning its fitness to practise, let alone our own - we have a new layer of regulation and red tape.
I find the way it’s been rushed in particularly worrying. There’s been minimal negotiation with the professions it affects. And I’ll take a guess that you’ve never heard of it, have no idea how it will make decisions nor understand the sanctions it could take against you and your work.
It also flies in the face of one of the few positive developments being offered by revalidation - namely that the ability to resolve issues locally is being strengthened. Instead we’ll have another body that makes profound decisions, that can affect professional’s lives enormously, from on high.
Of course children and vulnerable adults need to be protected, but that can already be achieved within the current systems. I’m sure my heart won’t be the only one sinking at the level of professional mistrust we are engendering.
Tags: Child abuse, ISA, Suspended
I’ve just been made to complete the ’safeguarding’ e-learning package in my Trust (see my next blog!). As I only have limited direct contact with paediatric patients, I just had to do the basic course. This consisted of looking at five stunningly banal powerpoint slides that would only have conveyed useful information to someone who had been living as a hermit for the past twenty years, and didn’t know that child abuse existed. The only thing that seemed to matter to anyone in the Trust was that I should sign a bit of paper saying I had done this, so that they could fill in the appropriate forms indicating compliance.
I begin to think that the NHS is being run by a clique of trainspotters - sad men sitting in Whitehall in their anoraks, clutching their plastic boxes of sandwiches and whimpering with excitement as another set of returns arrives with it’s serried ranks of boxes duly ticked.
I can’t believe I did that! Should of course be ‘its serried ranks’, not ‘it’s’.
Me - the apostrophe obsessive! (and don’t anyone tell me it doesn’t matter).